It’s nasty and violent, but also brilliant, and easily the best in the series, the early critics agree.

Grand Theft Auto 5 is being released on Tuesday, but the early reviews are in, and it would not be a Rockstar game if there weren’t stellar reviews and some amount of controversy surrounding its release.

The videogame developer’s latest violent epic is garnering many superlatives for its refined open-world gameplay, satirical look at culture and its biggest change: attempting to tell its narrative through three different protagonists.

The game is currently sitting at a score of 98 on Metacritic, an online review aggregator that creates an average score from multiple reviews.

Set in the city of Los Santos, a fictionalized version of Los Angeles, the game features much of the carjacking and crime that the series is known for, but also has many new activities including mini-games that allow BASE-jumping and tennis, and much more.

“Grand Theft Auto V is the pinnacle of open-world video game design and a colossal feat of technical engineering. It takes a template laid down by its predecessors and expands upon it, improving on and streamlining some of its rougher aspects. It doesn’t break out of that template and can be brash, nasty and nihilistic. But for all its more unsavoury aspects, this is a game built with skilled mechanical expertise and creative artistry,” wrote Tom Hoggins in the Telegraph.

With many perfect scores, it is being called the best game of the current console generation — a generation that’s about to end, as successors to the Xbox 360 and PS3 are coming in November.

“The visuals are astonishing — just astonishing. Surely pushing this aging hardware to the limits, we get the dense downtown with its soaring skyscrapers and murky, rubbish-strewn back alleys. But then out into the country, we have rolling grasslands and desert stretches, coyotes roaming, the shadows of eagles swooping overhead . . . The world drags you in. It begs you to explore — and then it rewards you,” wrote Keith Stuart in the Guardian.

If there is a sour note, it was the criticism that came before the game’s release, that there are no playable female protagonists and the series’ overall misogynistic treatment of women seems to remain.

Chris Suellentrop in The New York Times asked series producer Dan Houser about the omission of female protagonists: “When I asked Mr. Houser if he had thought about the portrayal of women in Rockstar’s games, he said, ‘Seemingly not as much as I should have.’ He added: ‘These three guys fit with the story we wanted to tell. It would be hard to take one of them and replace him — I mean, I suppose we could have done it, early enough on — with a female character.’”

Rockstar is investigating early sales leaks of the game.

“We are in the process of investigating early ‘sales’ to determine how and why that is occurring,” a Rockstar spokesperson told gaming business website, Games Industry International.

In Britain, some people on Twitter speculated that the game was sent out early by Amazon.uk because of worries of a job action by Royal Mail employees over concerns that the entity will be sold.

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